Activision Blizzard has revealed it has lost almost a million users for its "World of Warcraft" after years as being the by-word in online games.

Halfway through a results conference call, executives said it finished the quarter with 10.3 million active subscribers to World of Warcraft, the online role-playing game that generated more than a $1 billion in revenue last year. But all that was down from 11.1 million subscribers at the end of the previous quarter and Wall Street is fretting that the age of WoW is over.

The steep fall in regular-paying users makes the company more vulnerable to its main rival, Electronic Arts, which is releasing a highly anticipated online game based on "Star Wars" in December. Activision said it was working on developing new content to improve its game and bring new players back to WoW..

Things are not going well in the gaming industry. Yesterday Take-Two Interactive reported a net loss and warned that its top sports title "NBA 2K11" would take a sales hit because of labour strife that has delayed the start of the National Basketball Association season.

Activision raised its earnings per share forecast for the year by 10 percent because it expected "Call of Duty" to perform better than it had planned. The game went on sale at midnight on Tuesday. The last edition of "Call of Duty" made the outfit $1 billion in revenue in less than two months, which set an industry record.

The San Francisco Police Department is investigating how four of its ununiformed cops ended up being Apple's secret enforcers. The SFPD is becoming more embarrassed by the incident which appears to have broken every rule in the book and shows them to be the taxpayer paid enforcers for Jobs' mob.

When an iPhone 5 prototype went missing six people knocked on the door of Sergio Calderón. Apple's security was convinced that the phone was on the premises thanks to the latest technology it has for tracking fanboys.

Two of the people who attended were black shirted members of Apple's security, who are known by the nick name of the Stasi. The rest were real cops, and the owner of the house let Apple staff snoop around assuming that was the case.

SFPD spokesman Lt. Troy Dangerfield said that the police department was looking into the manner in which four plainclothes officers assisted two Apple Stasi. For some reason the cops have no record of the four taking time off from fighting crime to act as Apple security staff. The fact they were there at all creates some fairly serious questions.

Calderón said that the people who showed up at his door said they were SFPD officers, but there was no record of a visit to his home. The police who showed up said they were only there as observers and stayed outside while the Apple security officers searched.

But there are some other somewhat tacky parts to the story. The Apple staff apparently threatened Calderon that they would expose the immigration status of his relatives if he didn't agree to the search of his home. Legally that is considered extortion, and any cops involved would be violating the searched party's constitutional rights.

The phone did not turn up at the Calderon address so the whole thing is turning out to be a huge embarrassment for both Apple and the fuzz.

Selby said that these slips were unavoidable and in most cases there was never any malice involved, it is simply a case of human error. “However, loosing a USB drive that is completely 'open' for such critical security content is unforgivable,” he said.

Given that fully encrypted USB drives only cost £40 even governments on an austerity drive can afford them. Encrypted drives such as those from Kingston Technology would have ensured that even if the finder placed the drive in their computer they would have less than 10 attempts at the password before all data was permanently erased from the device.

“With such simplistic, and low cost secure USB solutions available it never ceases to amaze us just how these situations are ever allowed to happen, Selby told us.